Cassandra Phillips' Research Interest
HIV is difficult to detect in infants that are born to HIV positive mothers because of sparse concentration of viral particles in blood. If HIV viral particles could be concentrated into a local region, then an early detection of the virus could be sited. To evaluate this, an HIV pseudo virus is built and the concentration of viral particles is measured. By using fluorescence correlation spectroscopy merged with an optical trap set-up, it’s speculated that polymer can be added to viral particles to aggregate them in a local region, increasing the concentration.
